The Ultimate Guide to Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

If you notice yourself or your team working on activities that require jumping from application to application, completing tasks that require little thinking, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software can help. RPA is a quick yet effective automation tool.

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What is RPA?

Robotic process automation (RPA) is an emerging form of clerical process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers.

While Wikipedia’s description is accurate, it could be more specific. RPA is a generic tool using screen scraping and other technologies to create specialized agents which can automate clerical tasks. RPA is currently one of the most popular Artificial Intelligence application areas as it allows companies with legacy systems to automate their workflows. Companies are excited about RPA solutions because

most large non-tech companies still rely on legacy systems

a large share of knowledge workers still complete automatable work using numerous systems including some legacy systems

What is the level of interest in RPA?

Level of interest in RPA before the financial crisis triggered by coronavirus was quite robust. We cited industry analysts, participants as well as public sources showing that RPA has had stronger growth than most other software solutions, creating a >$1 billion market.

Even though the crisis will slow down IT spending as companies aim to preserve cash in an uncertain economic environment, digitization and automation initiatives, which result in cost savings, are likely to remain popular during times of economic uncertainty as well.

According to industry analysts

According to Gartner, RPA is the fastest-growing segment of the global enterprise software market and estimates that 85% of large and very large organizations will deploy some form of RPA. They estimate that RPA grew 63% in 2018 to $846 million with all top 3 vendors growing >40%.

Forrester shows the growth of the RPA market in the image below. While the total RPA market revenue was $125 million in 2016, the total valuation of the top 3 RPA firms became $10.8 billion, with total revenue of $1 billion in 2019, and the total RPA revenue is expected to increase to $1.5 billion in 2020.

According to Google queries

As you can see in the graph at the top of post, interest in RPA has grown ~10x in the past 1.5 years. Google users searching for the keyword “RPA” grew from insignificant numbers by the end of 2015 to ~27,000 per month today in the US according to keywordtool.io.

According to industry participants

Fortune 500 CEOs also quickly got excited about RPA. John Cryan, CEO of Deutsche Bank said back in September 2017:

In our banks we have people behaving like robots doing mechanical things, tomorrow we’re going to have robots behaving like people

With so much interest in the topic, consulting companies like BCG, McKinsey and Accenture have integrated RPA into their digitization solutions. Here’s an Accenture video that outlines on a high level, how RPA works.

Will RPA continue growing?

RPA is expected to remain the fastest growing enterprise tech. RPA has exhibited strong growth in the past and most industry analysts expect the global RPA market revenues to continue growing at a strong pace:

Looking at the growth of the popularity in RPA in 2017 as seen in the image below, we thought it was possible for the market to peak. But as you see in the image in the top of the article, instead of peaking, market growth continued strongly.

Why is RPA relevant now?

Because it is the most cost-efficient and effective way to automate modern office tasks. Let us explain why in detail:

1- Employees today use a larger number of tools compared to the past. It is not feasible to automate all those tools and their interactions with simple macros

There’s an app for everything today. Hosted in the cloud, integrated via APIs, CRM, ERP, productivity and other apps run today’s enterprises. So why do we need to build our specialized robots? Well, the problem is business processes. Business processes need input from different tools and we have been using an increasing number of tools every year:

With more tools, comes need for integration. Though every major tool has an API, developer company may not provide open access to the API. Without API access users are forced to export complex CSVs and resort to other complex but boring data janitor work. Who can blame the vendors? Every vendor wants to have a sticky product. Sadly. making integration and data migration difficult increases switching costs and creates frustrated but loyal customers. This also explains the rise of tools like Zapier and IFTTT (If this then that) that raised almost $40M.

Sometimes vendors aren’t the ones to blame. Most large companies still use some systems built with 2000s technology. And legacy systems are not supposed to be providing integration to modern tools. RPA provides a solution to these problems. Software robots step up to bridge the gaps between systems. Additionally, some business logic involved in business processes are quite simple and bots also automate such reasoning.

2- Advances in computer vision and integrations with common enterprise tools enabled RPA tools to automate processes in every enterprise setting, including remote desktops

Advances in computer vision enabled RPA programs to work with all types of enterprise software starting democratization of automation.

RPA can be thought about as a digital spine connecting all applications. Having a digital spine to connect all applications is more valuable today compared to the past because we have a higher number of applications now. Furthermore, virtual desktops (e.g. Citrix) where the end user has only access to the images from applications presented a challenge for automation. However, leading RPA solutions are able to work with desktop virtualization solutions through a combination of integrations and computer vision.

3- Outsourcing no longer creates benefits as most benefits of outsourcing have been reaped

In the 90s and 2000s, almost every Fortune 500 company invested in low cost countries or worked with Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) firms to outsource their manual processes. They received the same result without remotely the same costs. However, several factors (listed below) prevent outsourcing from playing a larger role and lead to the rise of RPA

Most cost-arbitrage is already completed: While that cost advantage was quite significant, it’s fading. According to Deloitte’s Global Outsourcing Survey, in 2016, 75% of organizations profiled reported that they had already realized cost-saving targets by leveraging labor arbitrage. If that number is even remotely indicative of the larger population, outsourcing simply isn’t the same game-changer it once was.

Outsourcing still requires coordination from expensive labor in the developed world. Unlike bots, BPO companies need more oversight to ensure that they improve their operations

Wages in developing countries are increasing: And the increase is faster than the wage increases in developed countries. While currency devaluations offset some of this trend, developing world labor is still getting expensive

Process errors are costly and BPO leads to limited error reduction: While this virtual labor source is much cheaper than the local talent, it still has some cost and is prone to errors.

Because of these factors, leading companies today eliminate manual processes thanks to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. So whenever your company has a manual process, it is a good opportunity to ask yourself: How can we automate this process? As you can see in our comprehensive guide on Robotic Process Automation (RPA), RPA can help automate repetitive manual processes.

History of RPA

There are 3 critical capabilities that make up a modern RPA company: screen scraping, Business Process Automation and Artificial Intelligence.

As Robert Rennie explains the precursors of RPA was simple screen scraping programs built for testing automation. Both leading (UiPath) and emerging (Argos Labs) RPA companies have their roots in screen scraping. For automation of testing or various other tasks, companies need effective screen scraping solutions. However, the first screen scraping solutions, such as those that were available in 1990s were too brittle. They needed reprogramming with every tiny change in the user interface because they relied on component identities in the user interface modules. By late 2000s, early 2010s, the screen scraping solutions relied more on image processing rather than hard coding component names. Therefore, screen scrapers were able to react to changes in the UX in a much more flexible manner like humans.

Over time, financial institutions working with these screen scrapers were able to automate complex processes. This allowed emerging RPA companies to build business process automation solutions on top of their screen scrapers. Business process automation (BPA) solutions existed since 1990s and they were already quite mature so there was not that much research needed to bind BPA to screen scrapers.

Finally, with the rise of AI, companies became increasingly aware that machines could surpass humans in simple cognitive tasks like OCR or pattern recognition. The RPA developers that we know today were born as they added AI capabilities to their software with partnerships and through their marketplaces.

Benefits

No wonder interest in RPA is growing so fast. Manual processes are inefficient, prone to errors and lead to employee dissatisfaction. With RPA companies can

Is RPA ready for production?

Yes, most large non-tech organizations that rely on numerous systems including legacy applications already piloted RPA deployments with satisfactory results. We have an extensive list of RPA case studies highlighting global brands that set up hundreds of bots.

Global CEOs and their consultants are excited about RPA. Just take a look at these quotes from the most reputable names&brands in business:

In our bank we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow we will have robots behaving like people. It doesn’t matter if we as a bank will participate in these changes or not, it is going to happen.

Integrations are necessary for your bot to work with your enterprise applications. It is also possible for the bot to screen scrape and still perform tasks however it is more reliable to have app integration compared to screen scraping as screen scraping tends to have a higher probability of causing errors. Most bots in the market work with legacy applications (though coverage depends from vendor to vendor), web applications, desktop applications and other major enterprise software including SAP, Citrix, Java and mainframe applications.

Programming interfaces are required because bots need to be programmed. RPA programming is relatively simple compared to other types of programming and there are code-free ways to program RPA bots. We explain different ways of programming RPA bots in detail in our RPA tools article.

Orchestration modules facilitate management of bots

Management console for your bots and processes. Allows you to start/stop or schedule bots and analyze bot activity. Orchestrators highlight issues that bots encounter and provide a dashboard for the processes that are managed by RPA. UiPath Orchestrator is an example.

Key features:

Business exception handling: No matter how well programmed, your bots will run into issues with the diverse data they encounter. These exceptions need to be highlighted, managed via queues and seamlessly assigned to personnel to be resolved before they lead to any bottlenecks or delays for customers in your processes.

Different user access levels: Several user access levels enables orchestrator to be used by different personnel for various functions.

Analytics capabilities: Bots will be working with legacy systems uncovering a trove of data that may not be available in other analytics modules. Capabilities to run advanced analysis and combine different data sources are critical

Deloitte UK has a nice video on how RPA works on a simple example that shows the bot extracting and processing data from an email:

Possible activities / tasks of RPA bots

RPA bots can use the operating system applications like a human user. Bots are capable of these but please note that this is not a comprehensive list. RPA is too flexible for us to provide a full list of bot actions

Launching and using various applications including

Opening emails and attachments

Logging into applications

Moving files and folders

Integrating with enterprise tools by

Connecting to system APIs

Reading and writing to databases

Augmenting your data by

Scraping data from the web including social media

Data processing

Following logical rules such as “if/then” rules

Making calculations

Extracting data from documents

Inputting data to forms

Extracting and reformatting data into reports or dashboards

Merging data from multiple sources

Copying and pasting data

Bots can do these functions on virtualization solutions like Citrix or on Windows environment. Most vendors do not support other OS environments like Mac OS or Linux. This is because most office work is conducted on PCs.

Document processing

Another common task for RPA bots is document processing. Document-based processes constitute a fundamental part of RPA tasks. With the increasing volume of documents in businesses, automating these processes is a must. While these documents include invoices, receipts, order forms, contracts, and prescriptions, RPA can be used for handling many document-related processes in a wide range of industries.

However, most RPA solutions do not come with leading edge document processing technology. For example, Hypatos, a document automation vendor, can be embedded in RPA bots via an easy-to-integrate API to boost automation rates. Using RPA in combination with such document automation solutions will have critical benefits like increased process speed, reduced costs/errors, improved data quality, and employee satisfaction, as these processes are low skill tasks that are required to be done continuously.

Types of RPA

All RPA tools can be categorized by the functionality they provide in these 3 dimensions:

Programming options: RPA bots need to be programmed and there are a few ways to program bots which involve trade-offs between complexity of bots and programming time

Cognitive capabilities: Programmed bots need to have cognitive capabilities to determine their actions based on inputs they gather from other systems. RPA tools provide a range of cognitive capabilities

Usage: Bots serve specific functions. Though most RPA tools can be used to build bots that serve all these functions, some tools are more optimized for attended or unattended automation. While unattended automation is batch-like background processes, in attended automation users, for example customer service reps, invoke bots like invoking macros. Feel free to read our attended RPA article for more on that topic.

Alternatives/substitutes

Essentially RPA allows a higher degree of automation through software. Of course RPA are not the only means to achieve automating for processes that cut across numerous systems. Before RPA, companies relied on 3 approaches. These approaches are shown below by Deloitte. Please note that Deloitte has not added cost/efficiency as a dimension here. In most cases involving repetitive simple tasks, RPA is also the most cost-effective approach:

In short, none of these approaches offer the flexibility, speed and cost advantages of RPA. However, as CIOs know that management is the art of trade-offs. And sometimes IT transformation solutions though they are slower, generate better returns in the long run. If you are not sure that RPA is the right process automation solution for your business, learn more about RPA alternatives.

Understand the future of RPA so your RPA work remains future-proof

Have we reached peak RPA?

Source: Google Trends

While we saw an increasing trend in RPA popularity between 2016 and 2017, there was not much increase during 2017-18. However, this was not an end to RPA’s growth. As you can see in the featured image at the top of the article, we observe that RPA is still growing in popularity today. We believe we have not reached peak RPA yet.

After April 2019, we see a considerable increase in the popularity of RPA. We don’t know the exact reason but our hypotheses include:

Expansion of RPA use cases in a wider range of business processes

Expanding RPA deployments within existing clients from pilot scale to more significant deployments

RPA vendors’ work with industry analysts focusing on hyperautomation. RPA is expected to play a large role as companies seek to further automate their processes

Launch of cheaper and open source RPA solutions attracting interest from SMEs and developers.

In the spring of 2020, interest in RPA has decrased. Coronavirus outbreak has initially resulted in reduced interest in all topics as people learnt about the novel virus. We expect RPA adoption to continue as cheaper and more capable RPA solutions become more widely available in both enterprises and SMEs.

Will RPA become obsolete?

RPA itself will not become obsolete, at least in the next 10 years. However, your RPA installations could need to be replaced if more custom solutions with better error rates become available.

To us, asking if RPA will become obsolete is like asking if excel will become obsolete. Better, easier to use tools can do what excel can do in almost every use case, however none of them are as flexible and have as widespread availability as excel.

This is due to an inherent advantage of flexible tools: They are there to serve end users’ needs before more sophisticated/customized tools are available. Therefore they always end up serving a function. To see this in case of RPA, we need to look at how automation solutions are developed:

Due to changes in the market or the company, a new process is required. Or due to advancements in automation and cognitive computing, it becomes possible to automate processes that were not easy to automate before.

While developers work to build a custom solution for the process, some companies do not wait for the custom solution and implement an RPA solution instead

The custom solution becomes available and it will slowly gain market share.

Since this process is constantly ongoing, there will always be a need for RPA so companies can build quick automation solutions. However, as this process also demonstrates, you need to be mindful of the running cost of an RPA automation which includes:

cost of errors

effort for manual tasks that remain part of the process

effort for maintenance

license fees for the bots

If a new, more customized, cheaper or smarter solution becomes available and if it can offer cost savings compared to the costs of running an RPA automation, then switching to an RPA alternative may make sense.

Though we believe that there will be a place for RPA in the future, that does not mean that RPA will not evolve:

What’s the future of RPA?

These are 3 Achilles heels of RPA which leading solution providers are working to fix. All of these solutions focus on the 2 most expensive portions of RPA deployment: 1- Design & development and 2- maintenance. These solutions are:

No code RPA: Enabling companies rely on cheaper resources and reduce RPA development time

Self learning RPA: Automating process modelling using system logs and videos of users working on the process

Identify how RPA can automate your business processes

RPA use cases/application areas

Numerous business processes can be automated with RPA. Some examples that exist in almost all industries are are:

Application processing

Quote-to-cash

Procure-to-pay

Data migration and entry

Periodic report preparation and dissemination

There are also numerous industry (e.g. telecom, financial services) or business function (e.g. marketing, sales) specific processes that can be automated with RPA. If you want more ideas on how to apply RPA at your company, we listed >50 RPA application areas in detail.

RPA case studies

Every industry (e.g. telecom, financial services etc.) and business function (e.g. marketing, sales etc.) has different processes. So it’s not easy to get a list of processes to automate for your specific industry and business functions. That’s why we are creating a sortable list of RPA case studies so you can see processes companies in your industry automated in your business function.

Industries that are being transformed by RPA

If you ask the vendors, they will tell you that any industry is ripe for RPA automation, which is technically correct. However, RPA can have greater impact in some industries than others. RPA is a solution you should put at the top of your company’s agenda if you business fits any of these descriptions:

Uses legacy systems

A significant portion of the cost is driven by repetitive processes

Some industries that have companies that fit both of these points are listed below. Most of these are old companies that rely on legacy systems. RPA can achieve significant savings and customer satisfaction increase in branches, call centers and the backoffice.

Financial services including banking and insurance

According to McKinsey Global Institute’s 2017 report on automation, 43% of these jobs are automatable. This is because data entry and processing is an important part of these businesses. Furthermore, these businesses are subject to constant changes in regulation such as KYC requirements. Bots can be taught regulatory changes quickly and in a centralized way. This helps companies avoid embarrassing compliance issues.

Account maintenance services not currently supported by straight-through processing

Underwriting

Data entry for clearance and registration processes

Update systems with client information

Generate a renewal premium

Policy servicing

Update to customer information including bank account details

Reject or cancel policies if payments are not received

Identify and reconcile policy premium discrepancies

Claims processing

Process claims payments for pre-approved amounts

Assign to claims handlers

Input First Notice of Loss (FNOL) submissions

Notify loss adjusters

Finance

Automate daily bank reconciliations

Process low-risk payments

Utilities like telecom and energy

According to previously mentioned McKinsey report, 44% of activities can be automatable. Since these are the oldest subscription businesses, they have payment and customer service processes which can be automated.

Choose the RPA software that best fits the needs of your business

What’s the best RPA software?

We did our best to answer this question by looking at the most popular/best funded RPA solution provider. However, this is not the right question because the right software depends on the processes that needs to be automated, price sensitivity of the buyer, current software used by the buyer and other criteria. Read on to find the right RPA software for your business.

Choose the right type of RPA tool

Programmable RPA tools: These are the most commonly used RPA tools. Programmers need to understand the process and code a set of rules governing how the RPA bot will function. For complex unattended automation tasks, these tools are needed most of the time.

No code RPA tools: Process still needs to be analyzed and understood but instead of programming, users rely on a visual user interface and macro recording to build automations. This obviously seems preferable to programmable solutions and in attended automation, we expect these tools to gain more widespread acceptance.

There’s increasing interest about self-learning solutions as we explain in our future of RPA article. Using historical (when available) and current data, these tools monitor hours of employee activity to understand the tasks completed and to start completing them after they have reached enough confidence to complete the process. These solutions are very attractive since they reduce can significantly reduce time for automation and some vendors claim to have such solutions, however we have not heard validation that these tools indeed work from RPA customers yet.

Additionally, all of these tools can be complemented with Cognitive/intelligent automation capabilities. These solutions (also called smart or intelligent automation) deal with both structured and unstructured data using latest AI and machine learning technologies. Read more in our article on cognitive automation

If we leave aside self-learning solutions which are not ready for enterprise use yet, it is obvious that no code tools combined with cognitive/intelligent automation solutions are the most attractive ones. However, we have seen cases where programmable bots were recommended by RPA resellers rather than no code RPA tools.

One complication in the RPA landscape is that most companies purchase RPA solutions from implementation partners rather than the companies building the technology. Implementation partners allowed vendors like Blue Prism and WorkFusion to have quick access to a global customer base. Professional services companies like Deloitte, technology consultants like Accenture, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) providers like Genpact have existing relationships with a large number of customers in various industries. They used these relationships to sell RPA implementation solutions.

Depending on the revenue model, implementation partners can be incentivized to increase their billable hours and recommend programmable solutions which creates a conflict of interest between RPA customers and implementation partners. However, this should be easily solvable by procurement best practices such as ensuring that different implementation partners that cover a wide variety of RPA solutions are part of the bidding process and compete to offer the most efficient proposal for your company.

Pricing – Learn the costs

As you can see on our page on RPA vendors, there’s more than 30 RPA vendors operating globally which should create some pressure on prices. First, major RPA providers offer their tools for free to

encourage developers to adopt their tools

to allow companies to thoroughly test their tools before making a purchase

If you aim to try RPA without taking significant financial risks, starting with WorkFusion’s RPA Express or UiPath Community Edition could be a good option. However, these versions are quite limited compared to the full automation capabilities of their paid tools.

Upgrading from the limited free editions, your company will need a paid installations. Pricing generally depends on number of bots or number of activities automated. We summarized different vendors’ pricing policies in a table here.

Most companies do not publicly share their pricing but especially new entrants are challenging that notion. For example, Argos Labs is quite transparent with their pricing. Their offer of $50/month/bot is the lowest we have seen in the market. Probably that’s why they are so transparent about it.

Choose the right reusable RPA plugins/bots to deploy RPA faster/easier

While rapid implementation is one of the strengths of RPA, there is still potential to reduce implementation time. RPA implementation partners have started to build plug&play bots for highly standardized processes. Benefits of these ready-to-install bots include

Reduced bot maintenance costs: Industries need to adapt to similar changes due to regulation (e.g. GDPR) or changing customer preferences. Marketplaces can be a resource for companies to reuse maintained bots that are updated in-line with changes in the market.

What are reusable RPA plugins/bots?

Reusable RPA plugins/bots are programs that can be added to your RPA tool to take care of specific tasks like data extraction from invoices, manipulating dates in different databases, transcribing speech etc. Therefore, they reduce development efforts, error rates and implementation time.

RPA is a flexible automation platform. Therefore, rolling out RPA solutions require significant programming and customizations. In this way, RPA is analogous to programming languages and platforms which are also flexible aumation tools. Functions are critical in software development as they enable code reusability, reducing development time and errors. RPA is no different, reusability reduces RPA development times and programming errors.

For example, we have seen that almost half of RPA projects involve document processing. Most RPA installations involving document based processes require implementation teams to use OCR and rules based simplistic programming techniques to get structured data from documents. This is no longer necessary. Vendors that use deep learning to process documents, such as Hypatos, are available on RPA marketplaces and offer easy-to-integrate APIs. They convert document images into structured data, allowing RPA tools to focus on the function they serve the best.

How to choose reusable RPA plugins/bots to speed up RPA deployment?

However, please be aware that RPA app industry is indeed an emerging industry and the marketplaces currently have limited reviews/ratings to help you find the most highly regarded developers. In cases where there’s little user feedback, it could make sense to understand how popular the developer is, understand the developer’s track record and follow procurement best practices. To learn more, you can read our guide on choosing RPA plugins/bots.

Choose the RPA consultant that fits your business needs& budget

Decide whether to have an in-house or outsourced implementation team

Even after you choose the solution your company needs, you need to decide whether your team has the capacity and experience to complete the automation. If they do not have the time or experience to set up RPA bots, business service providers like Accenture and Infosys can help. They offer RPA setup support for enterprises who would like to work with a hands-on partner while rolling out their bots.

While working with a business service provider speeds up deployment, it is more expensive than an in-house deployment team. If you are working for a large enterprise that will use RPA to automate numerous processes, eventually your company will need to build its own RPA deployment capabilities. We are seeing companies set up centers of excellence for RPA and other automation technologies. For example, UBS in UK has an RPA center of excellence led by Richard Wiggs. This is definitely a worthwhile investment for large companies.

If you need an RPA consultant, a few criteria can help choose the right one

Choosing the right RPA consultant can make or break your RPA deployment. Here are a few key criteria for evaluating RPA implementation partners. We sorted them from higher to lower priority:

Partnership with the RPA vendor you chose: Choosing the right RPA tool is important as capabilities of the tool will determine your business’ RPA development timeline and automation capabilities. You should only work with RPA implementation partners that are partners of the RPA software vendor you chose.

Geographic coverage: While some global companies can be great in certain markets, what matters in this situation is the strength of that company’s local team. After all, RPA implementation is a local service that is completed by the local team.

RPA Experience

Process-Specific Experience:The more they know the process to be automated, the less your team needs to spend time explain details of how they run the process and its exceptions and so on.

Industry-Specific Experience: The more they know your industry, the less your team needs to spend time explaining details to them.

Existing relationship: It is easier to work with partners you already know.

RPA implementation guide

How to implement RPA at your company

In short, you need to select the best candidate processes for RPA, get management and team buy-in and implementation, run a pilot and go live. While the overall process is simple, devil is in the details.

Understand the overall timeline to manage expectations

Based on the customer survey of RPA provider,UiPath, an RPA deployment typically takes 1-2 months including time required to configure, test, and launch automations into production. However complexity of the process, team size and level of automation will all impact project duration. Our recommendation would be to start with modest aims.

Plan implementation – Our roadmap based on best practice implementations

Any complex process can be broken down to simple steps and an RPA implementation is no different. Though you may need to coordinate both company and vendor resources to achieve RPA automation, knowing the necessary steps makes implementation easy:

Select impactful yet easy to automate processes

To maximize impact of RPA, identify impactful processes. These processes tend to be

Avoid common pitfalls

Organizational pitfalls: Lack of commitment either from management or the team itself can delay any project and RPA projects are no exception.

Process pitfalls:

Attempting to automate processes without fully understanding them. Process mining helps companies understand their processes in detail which makes it easier to program and deploy RPA bots while taking into account edge cases and different inputs. Process mining can also be used for fixing failed RPA initiatives, as it is hard to identify the reasons for these pitfalls. Piraeus Bank had an unsuccessful automation initiative because they weren’t aware of their as-is processes.QPR, a leading process mining vendor, shares that the company gave a full picture of actual processes and identified the root causes of why its RPA initiative failed.

Choosing an overly complex or insignificant process will lead to limited impact. For example, implementing RPA to an area like expense auditing where specialized solutions exist, can lead to significant effort without satisfying results.

Technical pitfalls: Choosing a difficult-to-use RPA tool can slow down development efforts

Post-implementation: Manage your RPA installation

Measure the impact of RPA

So what should you expect to get as a result of an RPA implementation? Vendors claim significant KPI improvements:

Blue Prism automated 14 processes of a BPO, achieving ~30% cost saving and improving service quality and accuracy. One can’t help but wonder if they passed those savings to their customers

Outsourced services provider Xchanging observed 11-30% cost reduction depending on processes automated. Company has seen dramatic increases in speed. Company was receiving unstructured data from its clients which were manually processed. Through automation, a process that took months, started to be completed in minutes.

As famous leader in management, Peter Drucker, is noted for saying: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. This definitely applies to the impact of RPA. Measuring its impact helps elevate the role of the implementation team, builds appetite for further productivity improvements and encourages team to identify areas where they can improve. Though it is complicated to do a though A/B test with process automation, looking at output and size of related teams before and after the RPA implementation will give a good idea about the impact achieved with RPA.

Manage your technology in light of RPA

Long term IT investments can sometimes be planned in isolation of capabilities developed by non-tech teams. And RPA gives non-tech teams a strong tool to automate their tasks. Therefore it is important for tech and non-tech teams to collaborate and ensure that automations completed with RPA are not re-programmed in applications. Scarce technical resources would be better deployed in building changes to applications that can not be completed by RPA tools.

Consider launching an RPA center of excellence

Once you have proved the benefit and viability of RPA projects, you need to consider how you can launch new RPA projects effectively. Most large companies choose to have RPA centers of excellence that help teams launch, audit and improve RPA projects. The crucial thing here is ownership. The business units themselves must be responsible for RPA installations or else center of excellence teams will find themselves responsible for processes they do not completely understand. Center of excellence teams should focus on aggregating best practices and helping teams ramp up quickly.

Manage the impact on jobs

RPA will inevitably lead to predictable redundancies as bots take over more work from humans.

For all/most employees, once most of their responsibilities are automated, new responsibilities can be assigned. The good thing is that you will know in advance which personnel will be redundant which gives managers time to identify new roles for the personnel and train them for the transition. However, this can not be a departmental effort. HR should coordinate the new assignments and managers across the organization should be motivated to take on employees that have become redundant.

As with any industrial revolution, post AI world also makes some formerly valuable skills redundant. Workers who are specialized in automatable tasks will inevitably be let go if they fail to improve themselves. Though hopefully such cases will remain rare, it is critical for management to handle those cases as professionally as possible. People need support of their old managers to continue their professional lives in the best way possible.

RPA Training

Since RPA bots need to be programmed, there’s a whole industry of RPA courses and tutors. If you are aspiring to get a job programming RPA software solutions, think twice before you pay for any training. RPA companies are doing their best to make sure that their solution is the most popular among developers so there’s quite high quality free training and community support online. I would first take some free courses and then explore paid alternatives after getting familiar with the products. Some examples:

UiPath Community Edition’s Forumis like Stack Overflow for UiPath with quick response times and detailed tutorials.

Not all RPA providers offer free public training though. For example Blue Prism’s trainings are confidential to its partners.

However, if you are already working for a partner or customer of these companies, then you can use their trainings for free to improve your skills. We have an article on RPA training where we collect RPA training resources.

Movies have been showing us physical robots for a long time. However the first AI bots that we will work with are software bots. This shouldn’t be surprising as hardware is hard while software is eating the world. We covered all major aspects of software bots/robotic automation here. If we missed anything, let us know in the comments!

Our recommendation is to get your hands dirty ASAP, that’s the best way to learn more about any topic! If you are ready to contact RPA vendors who can help you get started, let us know so we can help you:

if we want to give a company RPA solution, we must have to use any tool like Uipath etc?. Or we can develop the solution with code (according to the requirement of the client).
Because in some cases small companies can not afford the license price of these RPA tools but they want to automate their manual process.
For example if we provide a solution to a client by using any programming language (Java, PHP, JS etc) and making their manual task automate, can we call that an RPA solution?

RPA is a category of comprehensive products for process automation but certainly not the only way to automate processes. You can use scripts, macros etc. to automate processes as well. We outlined the RPA alternatives previously. However, I would not call these alternative approaches RPA.

Fantastic job. You’ve spent an enormous amount of time getting this blog together maintaining it against a constantly moving target. It’s not easy to dig through the vendor hype, particularly with so much VC money pouring in. The marketing machine is running at full noise.

It looks to me like the people working for nothing already in the off-shore BPO centres servicing western multi-nationals are at greater risk than the jobs that were too hard to send there in the first place.

RPA could become a tougher sell in western markets once everyone works out that a robot per desk is not realistically possible without an analyst / programmer at every desk at this point. It’s not ‘the same as Excel’, no matter how many time someone says it. The plethora of failed projects are most likely due to underestimating what’s needed to implement, and probably also overestimating the return.

It appears that it is still the case that stable, low exception, high volume transactions are the only ones you can get any appreciable and rapid return on automating, perhaps with the same but more complex (such as requiring OCR) in second place.

Thank you Bernie! Agree overall. In the short term, I think the programmer/analyst is going to be <1 per desk though. Programming for tasks rather than doing these tasks will definitely bring productivity. However, companies will keep on finding additional value generating activities to do.

Nice article. Gained a lot from this. For more info related to free RPA tools refer to the below link which is an RPA Tool used for students & developers where they can use the free version.
https://www.edgeverve.com/assistedge/community/?cmpid=SOC_FBIN_communityedition_41018&source=Digital&subsource=Social_Pyrite

can you please create a blog for BPO professionals who do not know any of the programming but if they want switch (as my job is gone due to automation) to work in RPA domain as RPA developer then
what should be Best learning path
Do we have to learn programing or RPA tools ?

A fundamental understanding of basic business operations, data, and programming in nearly any language will help you develop process bots. For example, can you define and use a variable? If-then-else rules? Loop amd increment through a list or array? Are you a master of spreadsheets? Web forms? Relational data tables? Do you understand how to make and troubleshoot API calls? How are your error and exception handling skills with logging? Do you understand every process has inputs, procedures, and measurable outputs? How do you diagram processes–do you understand basic process shapes and swimlanes? Can you estimate the effort it takes to work a process manually? Can you identify the possible cases where a process doesn’t go as planned and needs to accommodate exceptions? Can you estimate your own programming effort? That’s what you need to succeed.

Hi Thanks for sharing about niche technology and blog is very nice , I have Query about the same RPA, I have seen some of recruiters posted few career option in some MNC with 6-9 yrs exp , so my question is when was it really introduced to open world services & does market have such an experienced professional available ???

Hi Gopal!
Blue Prism was launched in 2001 and Automation Anywhere was launched in 2003 so it is possible to have 10+ years of RPA experience. However, it’s rare to find developers with such extended experience in RPA. Furthermore, RPA tools developed so much in the past few years that most of the experience from before 2010s would be hardly relevant. If I were you, I would not refrain from applying to such positions.

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